Friday, April 30, 2010

Journal 30.04.10

Size doesn´t matter: This maxim can well apply sometimes in the course of a person´s life; you might think sometimes that it could be deceitful, but I think that that only paragraph I wrote last night about the nauseating paralysis of illness is defining, the defining moment I had sought after for so long. The moment, on account of which I sank for years into the books, trying to find some words for myself, some way in which I could carry my own cross through the world; that paragraph might contain everything that I needed in order to start plundering the land on which my grave is slowly carving itself out. After my conversation with Florence I was changed from the beginning of my personhood on, the gift of conversion, to avoid the lifelessness of writing about things not your own – that I can´t do myself. I did everything I could in order to avoid the keyboard and the screen; I wished to have forgotten then what it was like to write but it can´t be done, I can´t look back. How to utter the expression “I gave up on philosophy” once you have chosen yourself as a philosopher already; why would you keep on writing if you have actually given up on the receptacle of truth; why not just keep going in firm steps toward the world, choosing yourself for something else, for something more real, more vivacious, something less taxing. What is sought after is not wisdom, that´s something that can´t be had. Wisdom comes only at the price of abandoning whatever there´s to rejoice in, it is adopting the vantage point of the infinite and thus excluding yourself from your own experiences. For years I sought the refugee of philosophy, in order to protect my sanity and as to shield myself from the facts of the world that haunted me from the opposite direction as I stepped over unyielding towers of knowledge. I sought after philosophy out of an apologetic act, it is not only that I wanted to be protected but also that I wanted to be exonerated from the facts themselves.

At first it would seem that writing about your life could be an easy task, something that any human being with an average linguistic capacity would be able to do; you write lists to do your shopping at the market, people you want to call in for your parties, books you wanted to read, places you want to visit before you die, people you loath, or that you want to see again. Anyone can do this by himself – you need no crutches from literature or philosophy, no crutches from scientific and cultural methodologies, no banisters from traditions and schools of thought. You only need to image how a teenager would keep a journal, jotting down everyday activities, conversations, dreams--- this kind of historiography doesn´t admit paradoxes, doesn´t admit of failing at writing, doesn´t accept failing at all. Yet one day you encounter the mysteries of human experience of which you are a part yourself, you are seduced and secluded by abstract thinking, by the sorceries and fantasies of philosophy, you fall under a spell and you begin to think that this is the kind of knowledge to which humanity must aspire – the knowledge of the whole, the objective human truths that legitimate the tense of our life on earth. This is a deceit from which you can´t be freed so easily. To find the way back into the concrete aspect of life is a very difficult task, much more difficult than the task of philosophy; concretion in thought becomes so difficult that a whole century-long spiritual movement has consecrated its deacons and priestesses to the task. That movement goes under the name of Existentialism and Modernity, and at no time else in human recorded history had we been so completely deceived of our own will. To become concrete means to betray what Aristotle and “true” philosophy stands for and in lieu of the vane falsehood and arrogance of Socratic ignorance. When the philosopher dies for the polis he is completely doomed both as a person and as a philosopher; there is no place in the world; no society deserves from philosophy that kind of sacrifice – to die unto the world? Becoming concrete is to decidedly astray from the task of philosophizing. Sarah Kofman comes to my mind over and over: Decades of writing books about Nietzsche and Freud with as much intellectual power as a singled-out generation would allow in one go; playing the archaeologist unearthing the vessels of writing about the self. What does it mean to write biography or autobiography, how do we write about ourselves? What does it mean life-writing? What does it mean writing? Decades of writing books and cutting open the Western man, looking for God, not avoiding the big questions of life, not avoiding the temptations of knowledge, not turning a blind eye to historical problems. But what does all this amount to? To write in one go a memory about your own life, with petty details about childhood and youth, with memories about mother and father, about dawn and dusk, about sun and dew, and then simple to die. Does it make it worthwhile? Could it mean anything?

These questions are not asked in a state of permanent intellectual sobriety and are not asked without a form of curiosity that shuffles between pleasure and misery, between pleasantness and mystery. They are only asked by those who have thought at some point that the human battles were lost and losing them didn´t as much represent a loss but a gain that couldn´t be quantified. They were gains for the world but never gains for the writer. He sits at home writhing from pain in order to gather the strength to write. We are no longer living in a cultured age where writing requires the knowledge of the classics, the philosophers and the vast array of literary traditions even though we want to delude ourselves into the lie that it does require it and thus spend long years in the Platonic academies learning from scholarship while at the same time trying to imitate the Socratic mood that never belonged in the academies and that if anything at all, it served to make learning distraught. We spend years hiding behind scholarship in nothing but complacency, running from ourselves and letting the citability of world history stand in lieu of our own thoughts that we keep private even to ourselves. We´re unable to face the challenge of life writing, the challenge of self-fiction; how do you write about yourself? How is life written at all if it not in the abstract? How do you experiment freedom if it is not intellectually only? Try to make sense of the world without the help of traditions and you will end just with childish fantasies, at best streams of consciousness. You want to be free in the concrete, so you think abstractly. The absolute redeems from the constraints of unmediated experience.

Being ill makes you too self-conscious and distraught at the same time. You sit everyday and write as if it were the last time you are going to write, as if there were no tomorrow, taking the helms of history on your own bare hands and propelling all the past and the future into an instant right after the present of the present in which you are going to die and surrender the whole world with it. If the world could die altogether then the fact of disappearing from this world could become the ultimately consolation but there´s no consolation here… You know that you are going to leave the world, that you are going to leave the world alone and that everything and everybody else will stay behind, but still you don´t want to let go. You´re lucid up to the last breathe, until choking; the symptoms of your lucidity are manifold: The long nights in the course of which you don’t sleep, but re-work all your thoughts for the previous and following day, wishing to be seated by your desktop the whole day and night writing them down; as if there could be a person that miserable to write down all his thoughts and transcribe all his conversations. Dying seems a very lucid and active movement. Once I said to Eveline something that comes by force into life now: If the whole enterprise of Western philosophy is about waiting for death, we might as well throw ourselves upon it. “Occupy your chair” would be the only commandment that Kafka would willingly obey; occupying the chair is like waiting but not waiting for death, waiting in general, without temporal index. Eternity is supposed to look alike from any vantage point you might have. From both heaven and hell, eternity is supposed to look alike – frozen. Eternity is not a law in physical nature, it used to stand for a hierarchy that glued all the principles together; harvesting doubts whichsoever over the rational proofs of any of the principles involved means to unglue everything at once and walk in the darkness. The desire for immortality, the desire that our deeds and works will stand in place of our personhoods once we vanish from earthly existence is very different from the infinite boredom of eternity – there the good god seems to be all alone, wandering in silence with a surplus of leisure time to spend and no companion whatsoever. Waiting, without concrete objects of hope, seems to be the way to receive everything that the world is willing to offer us.

Veronica: I´m not sure at all to have the words to write this without having to face things that both kill and give life. I told Florence in the afternoon that I didn´t trust the academies at all, and even when this is true about myself I have painstakingly made the efforts to make myself at home in the religion of knowledge and (dead) scholarship and I have also completely failed in achieving it. Soon I will be twenty-six years old and the truth of the matter is that I´ve learnt from too many people, read many books, written interesting pieces and written also a lot of filth, I´ve never been a student in a classroom. My classroom has been the world. I love this fact and I also abhor it because it makes me so different from most human beings that lay a claim on knowledge for themselves; it gives me a permanent pariah status which at the same time holds all the value in the world and yet holds in one hand all the disappointment too. I told Florence that in this inhuman age belonging to a university is no different from a business or a bank or a hospital. You follow policies and regulations, you spend all your time living up to petit politics and guidelines, principles - it is business management. The knowledge one needs for life is out there in the streets, even the prostitutes know more about the feelings of a human person than a professor of philosophy does. So little did I know about what I was just about to face.

Florence told me that in the middle of her illness when Vicky and Adriano stopped sending her money she had to be a prostitute herself and if anything, I think that was the ultimate trigger – how could she go on living with that? She just couldn´t. Going out into the streets as a prostitute in order to earn money, not having any other choice, not having anyone else. How could a person experience love ever again after prostitution? It had to be a type of love that faltered between the Messianic impulse and the love of the pariah and the mentally ill – the purest and most compromising kind of love that could never be fulfilled without the most abject disappointment about itself; this disappointment would be the only fuel. When she told me that, I pretended that I knew it already whereas I really didn´t, but I wasn´t surprised at all; it appeared to me as something entirely obvious, no reason for outrage or for surprise. How could I react to this? Exactly the same way I did because I was there myself: Living at a friend´s apartment in Givatayim without work or any ability to support myself, thus I took the ultimate option, to turn your body over to a stranger in order to get money which never served any purpose; it was tainted by disgust and by sin. I wanted to get rid of it as soon as I could, most likely alone at the bars sipping alcohol and deluding myself into believing that those were the nectars of love and life, of accomplishment. I was only able to do it a few times but I definitely believed that hadn´t I been lucid enough to realize the misery of my situation I would have continued doing that indefinitely until there would be nothing left of my body or my life. But I fled from that misery in order to go to Jerusalem with all my bearings and search for God – Mary Magdalene did likewise. I stopped enjoying my body and some thick fog seems to have hovered on me for a long time. I certainly craved for love, every moment of the day – love of God seemed purposeless to me, the absolute was not gratifying for me as a man or as a person or as a thinker; I always felt the same wantonness when faced with the miser gifts of the absolute. If anything, I wanted my love to be so very concrete, to be able to touch every fiber in my body; not to be a consolation but a nourishment; in all these years I am absolutely convinced that the only person who loved me in such an uncompromising way was Vitaly; in every other occasion I stayed in the revel of consolation, of loving without premises and not being loved back perhaps not because of showing too much weakness, but of being too overbearing in both good and evil to the person across me. Veronica was desperate, she was unable to dance because of her deteriorating illness and was unable to make a living… I can imagine her apartment in Paris in the exact same way that I lived myself in Bogotá: I couldn´t bother to clean my own filth for weeks with no end and ate from rotten leftovers in the fridge, papers and books and notebooks and notes spread all over, piles of clothes unwashed for months and months, utilities cut off time after time, rejoice in old times through fragments of letters and pictures in which I could see myself as someone having lived in a different sphere of existence than what was my current situation. Alcohol and promiscuity was the only way to reach out for human touch at all and then the sudden escape: I lost so many of my shoes, my books, especially my books, letters from Guilel, a book of Hannah Arendt printed in 1948, all the Jewish books, everything that I had that could remind me of having ever lived the life I wanted. Everything lost. Everything lost. Everything lost. Yes, I understood Veronica; from before I met her, from before she died, from after she died. I used to poke into the neighbors´ garbage searching for leftovers of food. Sometimes I was very lucky and found whole fruits, old bread, snacks and little stuffs to cook simple foods out of them. Other times I wasn´t. But it was always the same exercise: Filtering their filth, in order to find anything that could satisfy my hunger even if only for a few hours more. The disgust of poking through people´s garbage, it is unimaginable. Yet sometimes I was very satisfied; one night I even managed to make a weak chicken soup: I was like the Jewish Shabbat – carrots and onions, chicken and potatoes boiling for hours and then turned into the heartiest soup you could think of. Yet my soup wasn´t hearty at all, it wasn´t tasty and it didn´t fill, but it was a soup and it was hot and with a lot of imagination it could have been like the Jewish Shabbat. It was a Shabbat.

That was the kind of life I had the night I met Santiago, and that´s why my love was so frightening fragile, but it was nevertheless love – unhappy love; I felt at the time pangs of desire as much as I felt pain from my own condition. I spent so much time by myself that I couldn´t but be elated every time that a human person came through the door. There was no joy higher than that. When he stopped seeing me, I knew that he was in trouble, that he was not OK, that something had gone definitely awry and I was so unsure what it was and I think I will go happily to occupy my grave without knowing it, it is a deep frustration. He said to call me, so accordingly I didn´t leave the house for weeks just expecting his phone call and when I had to rush out to buy cigarettes or alcohol, I unhooked the phone as to make sure that should he happen to call, he might then think that I was busy and merry talking to someone. I sank into deep misery and the only one time when he did call me my fear was overwhelming and I told him to call later because I had just awoken, and he never did. I never heard from him ever again. Not one word spoken or written. It might stand out as a simple casualty, but to me it meant the whole world. I don´t think I´ve overcome it yet. It wasn´t even a matter of how much I loved him, but of how much I wanted to love him; it was certainly tortured but only to me, because I had allowed myself to burst out and deservingly I paid the price: Gillian Rose speaks about the dialectics of love – they can be merciless and they can also be merciful. I still insist that one day when I am released from this imprisonment inside this family and I will go to see Florence to do the tour of Veronica´s Paris I will go to Poitiers and track him down. Not in order to ask for an explanation but only to pick up the thread where I left it, as if I could! But I can´t be persuaded into dropping the idea, prostitution notwithstanding. I was left without any memoirs of him, there´s nothing material right now that can remind me of him. The day we met he wrote me a little note on a napkin which I lost, and then Maria Clara bequeathed me this hideous green scarf knitted by his mother, which I lost as well. Then there was my notepad with the blueprints of his photograph wearing the timeless red hood inscribed by my own notes and symbolic representation of the whole situation. That I lost as well. How can you retrieve something of which there´s no material evidence whatsoever? How to reenact it or to reconstruct it? It´s just not possible, present memory doesn´t allow it, evidence is always demanded for the sake of a verdict. So it seems there shall be no verdict hereby.

Journal 30.04.10

My step brother is in himself furnishing the proof of everything that political critics of modernity have always argued: evil always prevails! I guess I should feel a little heroic about myself because I still manage to sit and study the pre-Socratic philosophers about illness and death while he is playing that loud vulgar music, but there´s nothing heroic about it. It is rather sad; one should be sitting at some world-class university discussing this over cappuccino with some beautiful young man, staring into the flatteries of his hair and cheeks, perfect nose, expensive coat. But no, the reality is very different: The room accommodates three and sometimes four… The district attorneys and one or two inmates, depending on the verdict for that day! And old TV set hangs from the walls that are painted creamy white, but especially color dirt and unwholesomeness, especially color disdain and poverty, especially carelessness and indifference to life and the world. Those are the colors my father does love. Most of the furniture and beddings were given as presents from other relatives that thought they may as well do some charity in order to mellow our miseries, and we had to accept them with glee, thanking their generous kindness, so generous as to dump their garbage on us. Some wooden frames with photos hang from the wall, with each one of the children; we all look quite alike in all the pictures. That is quite symptomatic of the fact that none of those photographs represent us in reality, they just stand in lieu of ourselves, of the people who we really are.

Back to the step brother: Aesthetics always loses, is always sent home, home to roost, and the mobs always win; that is the greatness of democracy, that the ignorant mobs can always win and stand out while the blood still fresh from the patriots drips out from their filth mouths. He is always going to win, precisely because there´s no philosophical or intellectual instinct in him whatsoever, he might as well just stand in the world in place of a mushroom. And that´s the secret of his great wisdom for life: No thoughts whatsoever. How odd, to listen to that trash while one reads pre-Socratic, and I wish trash were the actual word, but there´s no English word for that kind of music; the music is probably not the problem but the attitude of debauchery in the people who take pleasure in it. Last night was quite instrumental in writing which proves the point I´ve been trying to make so unsuccessfully: Intellectual honesty. Whenever one explores his own truth there´s always honest material to draw from, and not just the usual know-everything speeches that I too often write and that more often than that I hate; but writing about illness seems too daring and too dangerous, as if I were anticipating something, but the writing on the wall is there more visible than ever. Something I always find all too frustrating is to write without having all the references I need in order to complete my thoughts, it is like half-writing; it is entertaining to steal from so many books, but still it´s not enough… If I could enact Benjamin´s project I definitely would: A surrealistic montage, a book written entirely of quotations… I would definitely turn myself into the passive voice of advertisements. There always seems to be more material to quote from, and somehow it is not only about not being original enough (which is true!) but also the fear of being faced with the text that one himself writes and without the mediation of the historical tradition, without the interplay of citability. I think it is too dangerous an enterprise to venture into alone. I am not ready. Americans compliment me on my English – I wish I could believe them and not just think that they border on illiteracy; both the compliments and my opinions about my own writing are half-lies, and a half-lie is worse than a full lie. The full lie stands on its own and moves along crawling like a snake, but a half-truth is like a drunkard – sometimes it stumbles, sometimes it walks, sometimes it crawls. Now I am trying to remember which play was the one I saw in Tel Aviv in German at this Givatayim Theater. But I can´t remember any of it, just having met someone there. Could it have been something to do with Anne Frank? No. The reason why people should not publish everything they write is that they will most likely feel very ashamed about it one day. That´s what I think about my blog; funny how the life of a queer person dwells on such fragility – at an age when I was not supposed to do write, I wrote letters to friend-boys (an expression from Hope) at a time when I was supposed to write letters to friend-girls; and now when I am an adult and rather experienced or just simply cunningly failed in relationships, now most of the time I write letters to women when I should write letters to men. One thing is clear to me now: Men do not understand letters. One sole exception is Þór Einar but he is not beautiful, this I feel obliged to write out of intellect and not about of love and thus that is a completely different style of writing. I wonder if I ever wrote a letter to Santiago, because he was a man, whom I thought was beautiful and whom I loved. Now I remember that I do, I also remember that I gave it to him. However, I never knew what he thought about it because that was the last night I saw him, the night when I thought that I would just have the opportunity to love him, but no, instead, it was the last time I saw him, right after I had just spent the night with his first love. For a change, I don´t remember at all the content of the letter.

Journal 30.04.10

The illness is nauseating. The thick sleep never abandons me and oftentimes it comes enforced as if with a hammer and it is completely restless. For writers illness is a particular issue, because I assume that bearing an illness invests the person with certain powers that be, with a certain gift for prophecy and a wisdom not at all temporal because the person is faced on a daily basis with the choice or the actual possibility of death – it adds a new and very radical temporal index to one´s life on earth, as if seen from the moment before its end but not quite there yet. Another thing is when the writer decides to turn a blind eye to death – to clean his vocabulary from any reference to illness or death, especially to any allusion to physical pain; as if he were completely in the know-how that by avoiding semantic references to his condition he could not only delay his final sentence but actually be healed altogether. If he is honest with himself (and he might just as well be not) he will certainly know that he doesn´t want to be fooled, deceived or lied to, but he knows that there is a sentence, he can feel it at every joint and fiber of his body that already while alive begins to rot while he can´t be sure about this at all – it might be a treat of his madness. Time to write!

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Journal 29.04.10

I am hair split about how much time during the day is spent in dreaming; the dreams have unprecedented practical implications in the guise of projects and businesses, I insist on devising them and writing them over and over and without hesitation. Yet they are surrogate far-fetched dreams, such as the kind of dreams that one jotted down as a child – becoming a policeman or a fireman, one is persuaded by himself about the obvious reality that one is not accomplishing any such, their only function seems to be warding off the present continuously and permanently. They are made to sound as heroic and tragic projects and always take place in the present tense inside the most obsolete yet absolute future. Precisely because I am so unable to follow through with them I am obliged to change them overtime – basically every day. Sometimes they involve the management of some large company, other times (and most of the times) they are about being a famous professor of something, and less often they also involved heavily humanized causes like being a chaplain, or an advocate for peace or a groundbreaking cultural movement. It is so well known that I am reluctant to grapple with my own situation that I insist on writing these projects over and over as if they had the power to save me from a life situation that seems vindictive – an irrevocable decree of fate, and just the same way I am all too keen on taking upon myself the clichés of bourgeois morality I also appear all too prepared to indulge in this kind of appeasements in which one accepts the fact of the world as they are and reduces his whole existence to a bundle of historical constrains within which one´s life develops forth from. Of course, should that be the case, I could never bother to write about myself and furthermore, to write with the detachment of self criticism. Writing is not only a therapeutic function of intellectual leisure (or intellectualoid) but it also a means to create oneself; to not be appeased and to outreach, to hold within one´s hand some kind of potential to re-create the future and in doing so, rejecting the present as it is, transmogrifying it into a version of the future that decidedly intrudes into the present as if with the sole desire to say no to the past instead of the common philosophical negation of the present. My last project is the least realistic of all but the most serious yet beautiful of all: I would like to run a printing press. This is so radically different from dreams that take place in the permanent slumber and unwillingness of academic halls. As a professor I could certainly become the equivalent of a Hollywood star, leading a life politically and egoistically metaphysical, riddled with concepts and perfunctorily empty of any real activity. I would console myself in passivity with the argument that the perspective of knowledge supersedes the pettiness of worldly entanglements, a well-paid version of asceticism including Sunday worship and humongous fairy tales. I know this to be a total fallacy, but I´ve withheld it many times, shamelessly, and I´ve even advocated for it, as if I were that kind of person who could ever spend the whole day in intellectual pursuits without taking a glance into the world. However, I do remember once I could, and then while living in this tiny apartment that felt more like a cage than a living space, I read in a couple of days two books by Arendt highlighting remarkable passages and then worked through at least half a textbook for Classical Greek. As remarkable as it sounds, I didn´t do it because I enjoyed it but because it kept me from dying. From my window all I could see was the dearth of living objects in a car garage down the building and smell from a far the thick sounds that sprang from the nearby Ocean. Yes, I was only a few minutes away from the Mediterranean and yet I preferred to spend the time reading books – It didn´t cross my mind at all to realize that soon enough I would be thousands of miles away and that perhaps many summers would elapse until I would be lucky enough to see the Ocean again, I am not speaking about the Mediterranean, but any Ocean – other than the sea of sickness and disappointment that family life has so gratuitously offered me until now, this is what you call community, being grossly close to one another as if glued by biology and by poverty as well. I was also very hungry at the time, spent long days without food and under the effect of pills for ADD that I had stolen from a friend as he popped to the loo at a bar where he mercifully had bought me some large beers just around the corner, in one of the most miserable yet interesting places in all of Tel Aviv; I was under the impression that there were many artist studios around there but I can´t be sure, I was never inside one of those buildings except the day when I found myself intimate with somebody inside a car that was on the top of a truck parked in the underground parking of a new building. He had no napkins in the car, this was gruesome. At the apartment I savaged all of Yaron´s foodstuffs while he was in Germany and since the computer was out of order, I just spent my days in the most desperate silence. At first I began by eating the bread and then this loaf of salmon followed by the delicious frozen soups, some of which were pretty old and wouldn´t taste so good, but they were still a delight to my hungry body at the time. One day I was so desperate that at night I leaked into the market that during daytime fill with people and smells, I went there with the sole intention of procuring myself food from the leftovers they might have left. I must say I don´t regret it at all and that such were truly beautiful and human days of my life; I spent whole nights writing until the morning and the starvation caught me so that I had to avoid the noise of the day but sinking into a restless slumber. The first night at the market was very successful: I stocked several large potatoes, loaves of bread and I think some fruits as well and candies that I had to wash carefully in order to wear off the mud on them. I was very happy at the apartment that night: I boiled the potatoes and added on them mayonnaise and I think a can of tuna, the mangos and oranges were delightfully sweet and ripe and I think I also came across some onions that I boiled and added to the potatoes and a small avocado. What a banquet! Virginia Woolf has got it so right in saying that the past is always beautiful once it has expanded into a memory – I definitely recall those days from the perspective of the just now as something very beautiful and inundated with the fragile lust of youth. Even as a writer it is impossible to detach yourself from the present, theoretically even… That´s why the whole enterprise of cultural criticism is infinitely inferior to the wisdom of philosophy and abstractness – pure thought is always timeless and irresponsible, indifferent to its own consequences! Nowadays when I leave the house I think about the very great things that I wrote while sitting by this table at this late hour and I wonder very deep within me whether there shall come a day when I will look back at the façade of the house with the vantage point of pleasure on the accomplishments of a remote past, and as for now it seems quite unlikely on account of all the disdain I harbor, but I also know it is quite possible. Differing much from those shipwrecked days at the Tel Aviv apartment, the now seems a lot more meager: I hardly ever get to spend any time with myself and when I do, it amounts to nothing just because I can´t smoke inside the house, throw a dinner party or just watch naked men over the internet. Back then food was something too pleasurable, especially when I could gather a few coins to buy a kebab and rice with beans from the Sephardic restaurants at the bottom of Eilat Street. Here I don´t have to be concerned about food because the concentration camp discipline takes care of everything: I sleep on a mattress under a stairway without a window into the real world (either I stare into the kitchen from a fat-stained glass or make sure that no one is spying on me through the worn out blinds that separate the pedestrians using the stairway from facing the chaotic positions of my body while I sleep covered only with a duvet that I wore as a child but only cut into one fourth of the original size and unwashed for a good number of years. There is more: The shower can be used only for a certain time before the local police complains about the waste of hot water and then the food rations are actually rationalized the Nazi style: The meat is bought once a week and cut into small cubes for each one of the citizens and assembled into bags labeled for each day of the week into the freezer; the number of bread loaves, onions, tomatoes, potatoes and plantains is also restricted and carefully inspected and overseen by a prosecutor. The curfew is to be observed religiously as no one but the district attorneys hold keys and no alcoholic beverages, cigarettes or guests are allowed into the facilities; not to mention any reference to one´s sexual preference or life, personal difficulties or monetary issues. And in the end the reader is just too unsurprised to find out that he is just reading the account of daily life in a family home.

Journal 29.04.10

I can´t say that I don´t want to write, it is the fuel of silence and also of darkness. There is a lot of laziness in me when I write, it isn´t preposterous, it´s not even a mood that I tend to, water in the mornings and then watch grow – the moods are irrelevant to my ability to write; the only feeling that keeps me from writing is the disdain toward my father and what makes me unfold in the direction of the pen is the constant reminder of an spiritual pain – the full knowledge that I am going to die; writing is running precisely the opposite direction. There´s this desperate quest to remain of the world, to remain alive, to remain young and beautiful; it is narcissistic and completely selfish. I navigate through the nights in thick rivulets of dreams that feature at times some fears that are superficial enough as to stand in place of my sins, there are also some spectacular dreams, some vague mementoes. At times I watch TV or just type pages with nonsense on and on in order to release myself from my duty but soon enough I begin to become emptied out of myself from within and filled in again with the crushing air of ambition without scholarship. The most painful part is when I sleep, I never attain the restful profound sleep that people often desire – my sleep hours are thick coatings of bodily pain and cycles of dismay and awareness, stiff muscle pain and discomfort around the joints of the hands and up into the shoulders; a fog of gruesome exhaustion takes over me for hours without being able to awake swiftly enough while participating as a listener in the fullness of the morning world. There hasn´t been a single day in months when I haven´t awoken to the screeching plights of this dense and dry headache and the total unwillingness to live through the day. Let´s hide in a cave and chase after the shadows of truth… The unwillingness of the everyday and yet so much of a grudge to hold against salvation! It seems as if that meager living is just a kind of bus station in between writing patters; yet I want all the writing to be perfect, I want to master all the topics, to master the languages, the words, the grammars but at this I´m most unsuccessful. I´ve never written anything I like. The reasoning behind it is that I am not inspired by common writing and by the everyday casual speeches of man – I want to stand as far aloof from society as a writer just like I´ve done it as a self. I can never imitate the feeling of my best inspirers and most likely not because I can´t think like them – I certainly do. It has to do with many other things: My depression, my alcoholism, my lack of sexual gratification, my perverted orphan Judaism, lack of precision and mastery in whichever language I would want to write in, lack of spiritual resources, perfectionism and fear. I am also afraid of my own results and of what I might be capable of, yet I keep on writing even when so mediocre a way because the fear of dying is so much more overwhelming than any other particular life situation. I dread the days but yet I am not anymore strong enough to bear with the weight of the nights… I haven´t seen the sun rising from the perspective of writing, I haven´t for so long and I miss it so badly. Right now I only remember it once in Tel Aviv, there was some Greek motif that day; actually I remember it now twice. The first time I was abandoned and the second, deceived. Yet no complaints so far! The second time I was meddling with the sand and the slumber, it was beautiful but I was very tired, sober, disappointed and sad. Now I think of Hope Knútsson writing her diaries since the age 18 everyday and now being perhaps over seventy. Yet I´ve written: But so many lost notebooks, either I lost them or I gave them away or I burnt them, they were forgotten in bars, they were left behind in flats when I couldn´t pay the rent anymore, sent them in envelopes to friends in foreign countries that never answer letters you send. I guess so many of them were meant to be lost because I am sure I haven´t told almost any story in my life from a honest viewpoint, it is as if I had never lived anything, as if I were writing from the perspective of a very childish imagination that still can´t grasp moral proposition being intertwined with the experience of life. An invented life that doesn´t rely on the amazing life story of the writer but rather on the abject pettiness of the kind of everyday details that un-amazing people want to hear. What kind of fetish is this petit bourgeois attitude to please the mobs at the expense of one´s own life and sanity? At the expense of truth and philosophy? I don´t have an answer. But I do derive an almost sexual gratification in hiding beneath the bourgeois codes of ethics in order to reveal the violence of that very attitude; however the consequences for my own person are direly detrimental for my own survival. Now I think about Marc, the most abstract friendship of all, so intangible, not anywhere, yet true. Everything is a distraction from the pain of sleeping and from the misery of writing. Writing must be bad because it is an antidote against forgetting, it is an antidote against letting things slip by, it is an undeniable record if not of what happened, or whatever you thought it meant. So many true experiences when isolated but so much not truth in the whole. Taking over the world by bits and as such, being left with bits and little else. I refuse to let go and to sink into the bodily decay of sleep. I refuse to have to tackle with some sort of physical weaknesses that point to the fact that life is starting to show signs of weakness, signs of a temporality that sinks unto itself to disappear one into the natural course of biological cycles without and from outside the works we leave behind us in the world, if it happens to be that we can leave anything behind us rather than the bleak and fickle taste of an unreflected existence. Why should one write for the public eye? Can´t we keep our diaries to ourselves? Does a minute of fame stand for leaving a work behind, for battling against biology?